Hello everyone!
I am Lakshita, a final year undergraduate student at EEE department, IIT Guwahati. I spent summer of 2022 with NVIDIA as an ASIC intern. I am here to share how I prepared for getting a core intern along with how the intern went.
Preparation:
By the end of my 3rd semester, I had made the decision to pursue a career in electronics core. I therefore spent December working on a Verilog project and learning some fundamental digital design principles. Around mid -May, I started preparing for internship season. First thing I read was the famous book “Digital Design by Morris Mano”. It gave me a very good understanding of basics of digital design and some standard circuits like multiplexer, decoder-encoder, register, counter etc.
In addition, I read about Static Timing Analysis (STA) which is a very important topic asked in interviews. You don’t need to go in depth, just get familiar with terms like setup time, hold time, clock skew etc. Also, it’s better to get your hands on STA problems.
Rest of the things include basic understanding of CMOS, concepts like pipelining, a high-level idea of architectures like 8085 or RISC and a bit of DSA. I didn’t focus on computer architecture much but would suggest to do if you have time.
Online Test:
The test was an hour long and had 20 questions. Half of the questions were related to Digital Design. Some required knowledge of STA, 5–6 from basic C, a few from computer architecture and rest were aptitude problems.
Overall level of the test was moderate.
Interview:
There were two people in the panel. And it all went for 45 mins. After a friendly conversation of around 5 mins, they asked me about my interest areas. Since, I had told that I have an immense interest in the field of digital design, my interview was mainly focused on sequential circuits and STA. They didn’t ask me anything about computer architecture but you might be asked question related to cache and all too.
Next, I was asked to explain one of the three projects mentioned in my resume. Then, they gave me an STA problem which was time-consuming and went on for 20–25 mins. Next one was related to sequential design with synchronous and asynchronous reset. In both the problems, they were not looking for final answer but were testing my approach.
Overall, the interview was interesting and simple enough.
Also, there was no 2nd round.
The Internship:
The internship started on 30th of May with a long onboarding session. At first, we were given a glimpse of amazing work culture at NVIDIA.
I was assigned to the GPU-HSHUB team of memory subsystem division. Both my mentor and manager were very supportive and always available to help.
First two weeks, I spent on understanding the structure of design and the flow of work.
My work was to package and design a few memory hub submodules and prototype if for different design configurations. Along with working on different flow control protocols, I worked on Semi formal verification too. It was really a great learning experience and I was exposed to some very interesting architectures.
Although everything was completely virtual, the management ensured that we did not miss out on the fun part and made some memories to cherish upon. There were few intern-connect sessions so that we can get to know about fellow interns. Along with those, my team also had few separate fun sessions which made me to interact with all the team members.
As the last step of intern, I had to present my work before the panel that comprised of managers of other teams. I was a bit nervous but the discussion with my manager and mentor filled me with confidence. The presentation before the panel also went very smooth and I was well able to cover almost all aspects of my internship. At last, I got positive feedback from them along with PPO.
Overall, I had a very good time with NVIDIA.
